Hi,
We are thinking of getting a border collie at some point over the next 12-18 months.
My daughter has quite bad social anxiety and is selectively mute in most social situations. We are on the pathway to see if autism is involved. She doesn’t have meltdowns or anything like that. When her worries get too much, she just goes to her bedroom to hide for a while. She gains a lot of confidence around dogs and found in her counselling she could talk to the counsellor if the dog was there. That dog was a Border Collie and she fell in love with her. My daughter also wants to train the dog and eventually do agility with it (I would prefer hoopers as that’s what I do with our current dog). She also wants to join Young Crufts and get involved with that, which I think will help her massively. We have found that once she is determined to do something she loves she will do it regardless of how she feels socially, she just won’t talk a great deal.
We have a crazy 2yr old Springador who is quite smart and very active. She gets a 20min sniffy walk in the morning and a 1-1.25-hour walk at lunch, much of this is off lead. I also do hoopers with her once a week. We hope to start competing when she is ready, hopefully towards the end of the year. I also break mid-morning and mid-afternoon with small training sessions. We do lots of enrichment – find it in the garden, long-lasting chews, lick mats, frozen kongs, etc. Our dog is now very good at chilling between these things. To be honest the only thing that really tires her is a full-on one-to-one hoopers session.
Both my husband and I WFH full-time in flexible roles which allow us to take time out in the day when needed. This will not be changing any time soon as we both love our jobs and the flexibility it provides.
The reason our current dog isn’t suitable is that she is bonded to me, I guess because I do the sport and training with her. Her parents were both working gun dogs and she does have a very high work drive and is not people-focused just me-focused. She was a bit nervous about other dogs, traffic, and people when a pup but we worked with our trainer to overcome this. My daughter will be doing all the training classes, and as much of the daily care and play as she can with this dog.
Our trainer also has experience with training collies and has had several rescue collies so we feel she would be a big initial help initially if we run into problems.
If on the unlikely (in my opinion) chance that my daughter loses interest then I would obviously carry on with them and will definitely do hoopers as this is something I enjoy.
We have spoken to a few show-type breeders and have two in mind. One has said they plan on breeding from two bitches next year but would only consider us for one of the litters as the other usually has litters who excel at Agility and that would probably be too much for us to handle as a first-time Collie owner. The other bitch has had litters of a lower drive and some of those have gone on to be pets as therapy dogs. I feel quite positive about this breeder as she has said this. The other seems to feel our situation will work well with her dogs, none have really gone down the agility route and most appear to be homed to families.
Are we crazy to do this?